Douthat on Late-Term Abortion

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Last week, Russ Douthat of the New York Times wrote an opinion piece, ”What Do Liberals Believe About Late-Term Abortion?”, in which he outlined some of the parameters of not only the debate regarding both late-term and abortion in general. This year the Democrats have used the abortion access issue as key part of the electoral strategy.

Some excerpts.

First Douthat provides a definition:

”The phrase ‘late-term’ itself is contested, but for the purposes of this discussion I’m talking about abortions that take place around or beyond the threshold of potential fetal viability, which (thanks to medical advances) currently sits somewhere in the range of 22 weeks to 25 weeks of pregnancy.”

Then to put the number of late-term abortions in perspective:

”… (the) belief, that these procedures are vanishingly rare, turns on the question of what “rare” means. Relative to other abortions, yes, late-term procedures are extremely rare: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 percent of American abortions take place at or after 21 weeks, which, by my calculation, would be slightly under 10,000 out of slightly under one million.

On the other hand, relative to other causes of childhood death that liberals take extremely seriously, thousands of late-term abortions loom quite large. The C.D.C. reports that in total just over 10,000 American children under 14 died of natural and unnatural causes in 2022. As the demographer Lyman Stone points out, if you included late-term abortion in those numbers, it would instantly be the leading cause of childhood death, eclipsing diseases, drugs and gun violence.”

He then covers the implications:

“…if you accept that they will be killed in meaningful numbers (numbers that would almost certainly increase under Harris’s preferred legal order), well, then you need to either retreat to the life-begins-at-breath position — radical but consistent, mystical but stable — or else come up with some other marker that establishes personhood at, say, 35 weeks of pregnancy and consigns viable fetuses before that line to a less-than-human status.

Having followed these debates for many years, I think it’s fair to say that the pro-choice side — not every pro-choice individual, but the political collective — consistently refuses to make this choice, preferring to occupy an ambiguous zone where late-term abortion is permitted in law, minimized as a reality and left unjustified by any consistent argument about human life or human rights.”

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Not-Quite-Random Columbus Day Musings

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Who were the most geopolitically significant individuals in world history? Columbus is the first obvious example, given the holiday. He served as the catalyst for the Western migration to the Americas. Who else ranks up there? The first three names that come to mind are Jesus, Mohammed, and Karl Marx, the founders of Western civilization, Islamic civilization, and world Communism, respectively. Communism is relatively new compared too many past civilizations, but the scale of its global impact far exceeds that of the greatest individual empires. Any other nominations?

A Canadian October Surprise?

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So you know Kamala’s campaign is in trouble when you start seeing the media throwing more Hail Marys than the UNM football team.

Some are more obvious than others.

I saw on CNN this morning an Anderson Cooper special that covered her past 3 ½ years as Vice President. She looked fantastic with plenty of footage of her with world leaders, in the White House Situation Room. She looked poised, confident, the epitome of a leader…. of course that perception was probably helped by the fact that the sound was off.

Then there are others which are more curious.

Headline in today’s Washington Post: “These Five Tumultuous Years in Montreal shaped Kamala Harris.”

I have been waiting more than five years for this story to drop. Long story short, her divorced mother took a job at the prestigious McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal and a young Kamala and her sister moved from sunny California to a foreign land of snow and poutine.

You would think a story like that would be worth something, if not to her campaign in 2019 which crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, then to her as a Vice President trying to cut an image on the international stage. You could have spun it as giving her an international perspective and some heft, she could have used it.

Yet to my knowledge no American media outlet has picked it up, only a passing reference to her friend Wanda Kagan who she met while in Montreal. Even her biography published for her first presidential campaign, “The Truth We Hold,” barely gave it a page. Hold that thought for a minute…

The Post article is full of choice nuggets pushing an angle of that racism and turmoil that Kamala had to endure.

There are the allegations, based on one witness and a lot of loose speculation, of the sexism and racism her mother faced both at the University of California and then in trying to find another job. No word in the article that McGill had a world-class med school and that life in Montreal, while cold five months of the year and juiced with money that looks like it came from a Monopoly game, is actually quite pleasant. However, that would provide a chaff cloud of reality that would deflect from a good story about a young woman’s heroic coming of age in a racist, sexist world.

Toward the end of the article Kamala’s school-age friend, Wanda Kagan, left Montreal:

“Ward felt the city ‘was just too racially divided’ and she returned to her native New York City.”

As for Kamala, after a year at Cégep she attended Howard University in DC where for her:

“The Washington campus was a world away from the racial, ethnic and cultural divisions she had seen so often in Quebec.

“As she settled into a seat at Cramton Auditorium for an orientation in 1982, Harris recalled in her memoir, she realized that everyone looked like her. ‘This is heaven!’ she wrote.”

So both Kamala and Kagan found New York City, and Washington, DC, less of a racial hellhole than a Canadian city? That sort of muddies the water about the narrative of racism. Not to mention that DC, to this day, remains a heavily segregated city. Of course Kamala was writing specifically about her experience at Howard and how she thought it was heaven that everyone looked like her. Hmmm.

So why did this article drop now, and why was it given top of the page treatment by the mouthpiece of the DC swamp? Let’s cover the facts.

We’re little more than 3 weeks before an election that the Left has breathlessly told us (ad nauseam) will determine the future of “our democracy.” We’re also in that critical part of the campaign when we start seeing the “October Surprise.”

At this critical juncture of the campaign, a vital part of Kamala’s media praetorian guard just happens to decide to run a 3000+ word investigative piece covering five years of her life that both she and the rest of the media have deliberately ignored for the past five years.

She spent those five years living not just in another country, but in a distinctly different culture. You would think that for someone desperately trying to establish her bona fides as someone who wasn’t an intellectual lightweight, this would have been something she would wanted to have brought front and center during the past 3 ½ years.

So when a media outlet does finally write about her Montreal experience, it focuses on the racism she encountered in a country that the Left favorably compares to the United States. I never thought I would see the American media report that people had to leave Canada and move to the US for its better racial climate.

Something doesn’t fit. Kamala’s campaign is collapsing and the Washington Post dedicates valuable real estate at the most critical part of the campaign to finally getting around to her time in Montreal?

Is the Washington Post trying to get ahead of something? What exactly happened in Montreal that Kamala and the media (until now) don’t want to talk about?

Ackman’s Choice

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Bill Ackman, founder/CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, has written a long and thoughtful piece (at X)  on his reasons for supporting Donald Trump in the upcoming election. This piece, which may be the first of several, focuses on what Ackman sees as the actions and policies of the Biden/Harris administration and Democratic Party that were the catalysts for his losing total confidence in the administration and the Party.  Since there are many people who are not on X,  I am reproducing his entire post below the break.

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Random Thoughts (2) : Education Edition

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1) Richard Fernandez:

“The actual purpose of much that is called education is not to teach a trade, or take you stumbling to the limits of the undiscovered but to put you in a position to laugh at people.”

2) From Thomas Sowell’s Ever Wonder Why?

Anyone who is serious about wanting to help minority young people must know that the place to start is at precisely the other end of the educational process. That means beginning in the earliest grades teaching reading, math and other mental skills on which their future depends. But that would mean clashing with the teachers’ unions and their own busybody agenda of propaganda and psychological manipulation in the classrooms.

“The path of least resistance is to give minority youngsters a lousy education and then admit them to college by quotas. With a decent education, they wouldn’t need the quotas.”

3) From the Brookings Institution’s SAT Math Scores Mirror and Maintain Racial Inequity

“Relying on a three-digit number to assess a student’s math ability clouds their drive, their resilience, and may impact their confidence in pursuing postsecondary education….

“…..In 2019, the SAT developed an adversity score to contextualize students’ scores to their school and neighborhood. Under pressure, the College Board then abandoned the single statistic in favor of an Environmental Context Dashboard, which provides information like the portion of students at a high school receiving free and reduced lunch, median family income, and advanced-placement enrollment.

“Colleges are starting to consider socioeconomic status in a more systematic way, and the College Board is too. This is vitally important, given how far achievement has already splintered along racial and class lines by the time students are about to graduate high school.”

I will add that at the end of the Brookings article the authors do detail ways of boosting disadvantaged students’ actual pre-college performance. That’s what is called in the trade as CYA, but ask yourself which is more likely to happen in the post-Fair Admissions v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard world? Hiding affirmative action programs under some version of an “Environmental Context Dashboard” or actually breaking the rice bowls of the K-12 establishment?

More vouchers please.